Africans,Read This Before You Get Engaged.

[IcezMan_IcezLady 582]

So our region has been plagued with numerous K-1 visa denial due to a major culture conflict; traditional engagement ceremonies.

Culturally, most African cultures will not permit an UNMARRIED woman to leave her parents abode to stay with a man with performing or paying the dowry (or at least something similar to offer marital protection to the woman).

In most areas of our region, proposing with a ring is not good enough to take the woman away.

Women who like to bring the "fiance" here also are pressured by family member to get this "marital protection" afforded by the engagement also recognized as marriage (if dowry is paid).

However, those activities or ceremonies have recently been considered MARRIAGE..(I believe, confusion created by our ppl).

So before you get "engaged" do the following:

1. Do not do any ceremony that LOOKS LIKE an engagement ceremony...it could be viewed as marriage

2. Do not pay dowry...Paying dowry is culturally seen as marriage. If field investigators come around , someone in your neighborhood will talk!!

3. In any gathering with the families, abstain from wearing similar cloths that are typical of traditional engagement.

4. Convince and persuade both family members about this important requirement of K-1 Visa.

5. Keep your social media page clean and monitor what you post and what others post on your page.

6. If family members playfully refer to you as "wife" "husband" or any attribute for a married person, correct them.

Read through the your country thread for embassy reviews..Ask questions and don't take anything for granted!!

Good luck to everyone!!

[AB loves AG 54]

Great post!

[Unlockable 7,315]

Very good work.

[Hansona 11]

Thank you for this! This information will definitely come in handy for those looking to obtain a fiance visa.

[soulstriker 274]

thanks for this , its sad it even took this long for this to be a post

[goobies 79]

Hi you guys,

Thank you for the great post. Sadly, we have already made many of these mistakes because we didn't know to not do them.

I am now wondering if we should instead get married in Uganda and then apply for the CR-1 visa.

Here is our story:

I (American Citizen) have been living in Uganda since 2012. I was married to another Ugandan for two years, then we separated. I lived alone from 2013 to 2015. In 2015, I met my now fiancee who was working in the same building as me. We ended up working on a project together and fell in love. Because of financial constraints, I was still not divorced from my former husband. We are finally divorced, and now I want to apply for a K-1 visa for my fiancee. Well, we have been living together since May of 2015, and his whole family and even most of our village knows that we are going to be married. We do call each other husband and wife on facebook, and to each other on the phone, because it feels shallow to say fiancee. SO I totally get that we are considered "married" by some standards. But we have not actually had a wedding yet, and we have not signed any legal documents.

Now that I have read this post, I am thinking that maybe we should apply for the CR-1 instead.

Any advice? We want to do the "right" thing the first time round.